LITMIR.BIZ

      Sergei looked carefully at his partner’s closed-off expression, then grabbed the mug for her and handed it down, not making a fuss out of his much greater height. “You picked that all up from one contact?”

      “Yeah.” Her voice said do-not-ask-how. He didn’t. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know. He had been there for the results, when she’d been the recipient of a “battery” of current during the events of last summer, and he knew that it had changed her, changed her ability. That, combined with the pressures and stresses they were under, on a daily basis…

      Admit it, to yourself if nobody else. She wizzed. She wizzed, and she came back, and she hasn’t figured out what it all means yet. And neither have you.

      The one thing he knew for sure was that her ability to channel current was stronger than it had been, which meant that she had to keep a tighter rein on it as well, or risk overflowing into whatever was nearby—electronics, storm fronts, receptive humans….

      Wren grabbed the sugar tin and a spoon, and placed them next to the mug, ready and waiting for when the coffee finished percolating, and turned to face him. He knew that annoyed, sweetly inquisitive look, and braced himself for what was about to land.

      “So. How was your session?”

      As expected, and speaking of pressure and stress. She knew that he was seeing Doherty; she had in fact been the one to suggest, without much delicacy at all, that the therapist—as a Talent himself—would be the only person who might be able to understand Sergei’s particular problem. She didn’t know more than that, except that he was still going, and that was the way he wanted to keep it.

      He was willing to do this, for her, but he didn’t want to talk about it.

      “It was fine.” He gave back the do-not-ask tone and saw her bite the inside of her cheek, making her look like a chipmunk with a hangover, but she didn’t press. For all of about a minute and forty seconds. Then her hand reached up into her hair, and curled a strand around her finger, sure sign she was about to say something she wasn’t sure he was going to like.

      Sergei felt a sigh building, and repressed it firmly. Once upon a time, he had been the senior partner, the guy with the answers, the one who had final say. After due consideration and a weighing of the pros and cons, he decided that he didn’t miss those days at all.

      All right, maybe a little. Sometimes. But if he never saw her finger-curl her hair ever again, it would be too soon.

      “So why did you give the kid back?” he asked, not put off by her attempted change of topic, and not giving her a chance to dig further into the state of his mental or emotional health. “Isn’t the guy going to sell the kid again?”

      “Maybe.” She didn’t seem too disturbed by the fact.

      “Genevieve!” He only used her given name when he was really annoyed. Or scared witless, but annoyed pretty much did the job right now. “Do you know what happens to kids who—” He stopped himself. Of course she did. More, she knew what happened to Talented kids who ended up in the wrong hands. No matter her personal opinion of kids, which was usually that they were best served braised on a bed of spinach—she would not keep from protecting the boy if she thought there was a need.

      He fixed her with a Look, brows lowered, eyes narrowed, lips downturned, trying to channel his father’s best “come clean now” expression. “Genevieve, what did you do?”

      His father’s look had worked much better on a preteen Sergei. His partner merely showed him an evil little smile and poured herself some of the coffee, yelping when a drop of it hit her rather than the pot. She shook her hand to cool it off, but her expression remained smugly satisfied. “Nothing he didn’t deserve.”

      Good luck, you poor bastard, Sergei thought, managing to spare some sympathy for the client, whatever else he might or might not have done. Wren didn’t just get even, she got ahead. Sergei suspected that if the guy even thought about being other than The Perfect Father for the next ten years, he would break out in a bad case of crotch-itch, or something equally attention-getting.

      Since Sergei totally approved of such an action, he merely shook his head and gestured out the window at the blue sky showing. “I don’t have to be at my meeting until this afternoon,” he said conversationally. “You up for a walk around the duck pond?”

      She wasn’t fooled for even a minute, he knew, but he also knew that without distraction she would go back to sleep for the rest of the day in a classic case of post-job slump, and that usually was enough to throw her off schedule, which in turn made her cranky. Like jet lag, it was better to keep her up and moving until the evening, when she could then justifiably collapse. Plus, and he knew that she knew this, too, he wanted to be able to check out her mental state firsthand. There was something going on there, something she hadn’t told him about. Something maybe more disturbing than an unexpected run-in with the Alchemist.

      The name alone was enough to make him shudder. Talent was commonplace, the Fatae still unnerved him a little, but wizzarts…He had seen firsthand what even the least of them could do, had almost lost Wren to the bittersweet darkness of that madness. He would never be able to shrug it off. Never. And never the threat of a man as powerful as Stewart Maxwell.

      The walk was as much for him was it as for her. He should have been there for her last night when she got home, and not left it to P.B, no matter how good the demon was at Wren-sitting. Until he was certain that everything was all right, that whatever she wasn’t telling him wasn’t something he needed to worry about, he didn’t want to let her out of his sight again.

      “Yeah,” she said, obviously buying into his pretense for his sake, not hers. “Sure. I could use a good chance to get nibbled to death by rabid and unruly geese.” She gestured with her coffee. “Lemme finish this, and go get dressed.”

      He still has trouble saying it, trouble going back to that moment. And so, over and over again, they return to it.

      “She almost died then. Worse.”

      “Worse?”

      “There’s worse than dying, and she was there, right on the edge….”

      “What happened? What put her there, on the edge?”

      That was the question, wasn’t it? What happened. He knows the why, and they’ve figured out, mostly, the how, but…I don’t know. Not the details. But it was bad. It was…

      It

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